


The Singing Will Never Be Done

by Joysweeper



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Canon Compliant, Early in Canon, Gen, canon typical animal exposition, canon typical tolkien references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 11:29:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20873474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joysweeper/pseuds/Joysweeper
Summary: Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted/And beauty came like the setting sun/My heart was shaken with tears; and horror/Drifted away…O, but Everyone/Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done."As normal as the morning had been, as normal as they were acting now, thingsweren’tthe way they had been before the Andalite prince. Before the Yeerk pool."Cassie takes Rachel and Jake to acquire their bird morphs.





	The Singing Will Never Be Done

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon. This poem was published after the end of WWI and usually associated with the Armistice, but it's also speculated that Sassoon was thinking more of singing in the trenches. "The poem, then, is not about joy that the war is over but rather a temporary and spontaneous desire to sing as a way of keeping one’s spirits up during a time of death, warfare, and uncertainty."
> 
> Well heck, when you find an analysis like that and you're writing a fic about Animorphs you have to find a way to wedge it in.

They all needed to be able to morph birds of prey. No one had talked about it, but they weren’t acquiring the redtail; that would always be Tobias’s bird. Yesterday Cassie had taken the healing young osprey out of its cage and held it in a burrito-blanket while it and Marco both complained and he’d gingerly petted its feathers.

“I’d better not start cheering for the Seahawks,” he’d grumbled, but he’d been happy enough to accept not getting up early on a Saturday just to go acquire something else. It wouldn’t have made sense for him to go anyway. Cassie only sort of knew him. Jake and Rachel were both around the farm often enough that they could come along without making anyone suspicious.

At dawn today Tobias watched them leave from the roof of the barn. He couldn’t keep up the whole way in the air and there wasn’t a way to take him. She’d felt a little safer knowing he would see anyone coming and warn them, and was both guilty and anxious when she saw him fly away as they went down the road.

It was more than an hour’s drive, and disconcertingly normal. Cassie sat in the front next to her dad, who mercifully didn’t sing along to his Stevie Wonder tapes this time. Jake and Rachel got the backseat, yawning and leaning and trying to doze. In the bed of the truck were the well-secured cages containing the osprey and the red-tailed hawk, covered over so they would stay calm and still. The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center had the permits to take care of birds of prey, but not the flight cages they needed when they were well enough to move around and exercise. Luckily, Cassie’s parents were friends with some of the people at the Lewis Science and Nature Center, and they were always trading birds. As a bonus, the staff knew her and trusted she wouldn’t get up to anything.

When they got there, there was an exchange of greetings and a couple minutes of small talk before the adults gave her a key and took over moving the birds, leaving the kids to wander alone around the public raptor enclosures. Each outdoor enclosure was too big to be called a ‘cage’, with mesh for most of the walls, lots of perches, and concrete floors. There were paths around, and benches and decorative bushes, and signs explaining what the birds were and why each one couldn’t be released.

Feeling guilty, Cassie got the things she needed. By the time she got back, the cousins had woken up some more. Rachel was walking along the back of a bench, her arms spread, scrutinizing the placards. Jake stood by looking jealous. There wasn’t anything here he could have climbed to top that.

“Thorongil, Galadriel, Arwen, Luthien… nerd alert,” Rachel said, laughing. Seeing the other two looking at her without comprehension, she said, “C’mon. All the birds are named after Lord of the Rings characters.”

Jake shot a glance at Cassie, trying not to smile. “Doesn’t knowing that make _Rachel_ a nerd?”

Rachel launched herself off the bench at him, saying something about AP English. Grinning, Jake blocked and ducked.

Cassie felt like she should have said something, but she couldn’t think of the words. As normal as the morning had been, as normal as they were acting now, things _weren’t_ the way they had been before the Andalite prince. Before the Yeerk pool. She turned so her silence wouldn’t be so obvious and leaned against a railing, staring at a turkey vulture with some missing toes.

She couldn’t really complain about the day before yesterday. It had been terrible for everyone, especially Tobias. But she kind of envied the others for getting to walk down those steps on their own power. It was stupid. It was like a shadow cast over the sun.

How could the nature center, the nice people who ran it, and all the education animals exist in the same world as that cop, and the Yeerk pool, and Visser Three? How could her best friend and the boy she liked still shove each other and make silly dares in that world?

It couldn’t always be like this, she told herself. She felt Jake come up to the railing beside her and came back to herself a bit. Even with these things going on, a part of her still got prickly and happy about him standing close to her. She straightened her spine and got ready to defend vultures, in case he opened with something bad or skeptical about them.

Instead he asked, “Rachel had the brochure. I know they’re all here because they can’t be released. If we acquire disabled animals, will our morphs be like that too?”

She was obscurely disappointed, but she knew this. “The bull elephant at the Gardens has a broken tusk. Rachel’s morph has two whole tusks, and they’re longer. My horse morph doesn’t have shoes or the old scars Clover had from that bad owner, either.” And there was no way to look at Tobias now and see that the hawk he’d touched might never fly again. “I guess it’s because morphing works from DNA, and injuries won’t show in an animal’s genes.”

“That makes sense.” He nodded decisively and braced his folded arms on the rail. “That’s going to make things easier. We can acquire some of the animals your dad takes care of, when it’s not something at the Gardens.”

She nodded back, and Jake looked at her carefully. “Hey, Cassie,” he said. “What’s up? You okay?”

Cassie had the urge to tell him that she’d dreamed of the cop last night. He hadn’t done anything, just... been there, wherever she went, looking at her with dull eyes, while she went about her day trying to act like she didn’t notice.

But if she told Jake that, she’d have to tell him about why he wouldn’t bother them again, or anyone else. She’d already closed the subject when he asked. If she opened it...

After a long pause she said, lamely, “Bad dreams. You know.”

Jake gave her a rueful smile that said he did know. All too well. He was pale enough that the shadows under his eyes stood out; he couldn’t have been sleeping well either. Impulsively, wanting to ease the worry on his face, Cassie stepped in and laid one hand on her back. Jake covered her other hand on the rail with one of his and-

“Dibs on the eagle!” Rachel called. Her thumbs were hooked into her belt loops as she came along the path. She must have been walking a circuit looking over each of the birds - shopping, Animorph style. When she saw them together she smirked and Jake yanked his hand back. Stifling a sigh, Cassie put her hands in the pockets of her overalls.

Jake squared his shoulders and pretended nothing had happened. “There’s an eagle?”

There were two eagles, in fact. An elderly golden with dark, disheveled feathers and a younger, more lively bald eagle. It was the baldie that they followed Rachel to, of course. When she and Cassie had been little kids pretending to be bird people, this had been hers. Ever a little brother, Jake put his hand over his heart like he was about to sing the Pledge of Allegiance or something. He lowered it when Rachel didn’t pay any attention, too intent on the raptor.

It was a huge animal, in that special way that large enough birds are huge where they seem to take up much more space than they really do. He was an adult, with a bright white head and tail that were stark against nearly black body feathers. Long used to having just the one good eye he only showed them his profile when looking at them, meaning Jake and Rachel didn’t get to appreciate how profoundly goofy and bewildered eagles looked like from straight on.

“It says his name is Gwaihir,” Rachel said with a self-mocking smile. “King of the eagles. I guess he was hit by a car and has brain damage or something, but just _look_ at those claws! He could cause some major pain. This one, Cassie. Get me in there.”

Cassie sighed. She knew some of these birds, a bit, and she remembered that Gwaihir was sweet, but it took at least two adults to make him do anything he didn’t want to do. She wasn’t sure she could support him on her arm, even if he’d been on a raised perch and willing. This could get tricky.

Ultimately Jake went to watch for adults. Cassie brought Rachel into the cage with her and used tongs to offer a gory half rat to the eagle, waving it in front of his good eye so he turned to follow, peeping like a hatchling. Rachel held still, lying in wait until Cassie had steered him around and she was in his blind spot, then crouched gracefully and touched the very end of his tail. The peeping slowed to quiet and Gwaihir swayed drowsily.

After a moment Rachel was out of the door, barely making any noise, and Cassie gave the bird his snack and trudged after her. None the wiser, as she locked the door behind her he held the half rat down with one hugely clawed yellow foot and hunched over it, pulling bloody pieces out and throwing his head back to swallow them. 

Rachel laughed out loud and spun around, waving her arms wide like she was eleven again and pretending to have wings. Cassie looked around nervously, but she wasn’t morphing. Coming to a stop with a sideways smirk Rachel asked, “So now I’ve broken the law, right? When are the Feds coming after me?”

Cassie shrugged and intercepted Jake’s rising confusion. “There’s a law about hurting or selling birds and their remains in the US. Including feathers, because people were killing birds to make their feathers into hats.”

“It’s illegal without a permit to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill, or sell any birds or parts of birds protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of Nineteen Very Early,” corrected Rachel, the daughter of a lawyer, who clearly remembered asking her mom about why Cassie wouldn’t let her take feathers home. “DNA’s a part of a bird. And bald eagles are endangered.”

“Oh, well,” Jake said, taking that in. Suddenly he wore almost that same sideways smirk. “We just won’t get caught, that’s all. Who’d know?”

With Rachel settled his eye was drawn to the golden eagle. That was a female, so big that she seemed as big as Cassie if Cassie crouched down. She was ancient, not terribly alert, and looked sort of motheaten. Her hunting days were done, Cassie knew, but her claws and hooked beak were huge. Too huge. She was about due for a trim.

“I’m not sure I could manage her if she objected, she’s not as tame. And she’s at least forty years old,” Cassie pointed out. Golden eagles could live a very long time. This girl was unquestionably in her twilight. “She’s here because she can’t live on her own anymore.”

Jake scratched the back of his neck. “That’s... _old_. It’s a she?”

“You poor _maaan_, you’d get cooties acquiring a girl,” Rachel scoffed, and leaned around to find the golden eagle’s nameplate. If ‘Elwing’ was some obscure reference, she didn’t seem to find it worth commenting on. “If she’s retired you shouldn’t acquire her. You’d probably have arthritis or something. I’d steam you in the air.”

Cassie shrugged. It seemed true, but she also thought Rachel didn’t want to be the smaller of the two birds. “I think when we morph we’re as old as the animal. Big Jim is an adult silverback, and Marco morphed to look just like him. He would have been smaller and not have the gray patch if he was like a gorilla teenager. And a thirteen-year-old tiger is getting old.” It was harder to say with Cassie’s horse and the bull elephant Rachel had morphed. Clover was probably about eight, and that was past the most athletic time of her life but not _old_. She didn’t know all that much about elephants, either.

“I guess I didn’t feel old.” Jake flexed his hands and then shrugged. “Okay. Suggestions?” He glanced back towards Gwaihir’s enclosure as if tempted.

“Peregrine falcon,” Cassie blurted, wanting to head off the cousins bickering and the prospect of another round of eagle-spinning. “They’re smaller and way, way faster. Two hundred miles an hour in a dive. The fastest animal on Earth, and they’ve got one here.”

That caught his attention. “What, really? You can barely get fastballs half that! Where is he?”

Rachel followed, shaking her head in a pitying way. “Boys and sports.”

“You’re a gymnast,” Cassie pointed out softly.

“Oh, I know. I’m not so into it these days though. Tall, you know? But even when I was, I’d never name a dog ‘Vault’.”

The falcon, when they reached it, seemed much smaller compared to the two eagles, about as big as Tobias’s red-tail but with long lean toes. It was a dark bird with a pale, barred chest, enormous brown eyes, and a neat, sharply pointed hooked beak.

Jake looked at her expectantly. “Which one do you think has better eyes?”

“Probably the falcon,” she said after considering. “They’re made to see other birds from above and catch them in the air. Eagles usually eat fish or land animals, or large enough birds from closer up. They’d both have great eyes, and bald eagles would see better through water, but falcons have to see their prey and decide and go for it much faster.”

“‘Thorongil’,” Rachel said from the plaque. “Oh, come on. That’s so much more an eagle name, and he was a guy anyway! This says she was a falconry bird bred in captivity and too used to people to go free.”

“His claws are kinda small,” Jake noted. “Smaller than the eagles’, I mean.”

In a wicked sing-song Rachel called “_Her_ claws! Choose her and you’re morphing a female!”

Cassie ignored her and Jake’s nose crinkle. “Falcons don’t use them like hawks and eagles do. They close their feet into fists and hit their prey, and then they come back around when it’s falling. If it’s not dead they’ll hold on with their long toes and bite through its spine.” It was gruesome, but somehow also more surgical than other raptors. “Anyway, with most raptors the females are bigger. They can take larger prey. I don’t think it matters if we morph male or female animals, either.”

“I mean, I guess they _are_ birds so it’s not like it matters,” Rachel allowed, and shrugged. Of course, both the animals Rachel had acquired now were male and she shouldn’t be the only one. Cassie genuinely didn’t know the sex of Marco’s osprey; you couldn’t really tell with them without operating. “Tell you what, you don’t tell Marco mine’s a boy and I don’t tell him yours is a girl, and no one goes and gets weird about it.”

Jake made a considering noise, his brow furrowed. Cassie thought back, suddenly, to seeing Tobias yesterday with a trace of dried blue-green caught in the base of some of his talons. When he’d been flying and swooping he must have used them on Controllers. Jake had to be wondering if a falcon could also do that.

That wasn’t something she had an answer for. No bird was made to just slash a larger animal deeply and then fly away. Hawk and eagle talons were made to seize and pierce, falcon talons to punch and grasp. But they would all attack predators approaching their nests, even big ones. Usually they didn’t do much damage, just distracted and deterred.

“All right,” Jake said. “I think… Throngil? Who names these?”

“Nerds,” Rachel said at almost the same time he said it. They each made a face.

In long-suffering tones he said, “This one.”

Cassie had a better idea how to do this. She pulled on a heavy falconry glove and took Jake into the enclosure with her, and had him come up behind her when she had Thorongil on the glove with her jesses in her fist. There was a bit of a bad moment then, when she was distracted - she’d forgotten that having Jake come up close meant Jake _being close_ \- and missed the falcon hunching warningly at her. The bird flapped vigorously towards her face, restrained by the jesses, and she squeaked, leaning back into Jake’s chest.

“Cassie, you okay?” Rachel called, keeping watch.

“It’s fine!” Cassie called back. The falcon settled back on the glove, squeezing hard enough to hurt through the heavy leather, and _crek-crek-crek-crekked_ irritably. Jake tried to back up and she grabbed his wrist and guided it up until he took the hint and touched one of Thorongil’s talons.

Thorongil went docile and quiet. Cassie suppressed a giggle and tried to ignore both the thought of almost being in Jake’s arms, and the heft of the bird, heavier than a hawk this size. She didn’t quite manage either. The giddiness was like its own acquiring trance, lasting even after she’d coaxed the falcon back onto one of her perches and locked her enclosure door behind them, because then, without Rachel watching to make him shy, Jake looked her in the eye and smiled warmly.

But there wasn’t time for that, whatever ‘that’ was winding up towards. Cassie had to choose her own bird, and she wanted to do that alone. Her friends wandered around idly and talked about who’d be better in the air while she considered.

It would have been _wonderful_ to look at the enclosures the way she’d looked at the occupants of the barn the day after getting the morphing power, thinking about getting to understand them by inhabiting their bodies. Even then the alien prince’s death had been lingering in her mind, she’d just been able to push it away for a few hours. Now she couldn’t ignore it - they were here to use the raptors, not understand them, and as much as she didn’t like it she had to try.

There was a red-tail here because of course there was, they were everywhere, but that wasn’t an option. There were several tiny birds - screech owls, a sharp-shinned hawk, some falcons that seemed fun-sized compared to the peregrine. There were larger owls, and while owls could fly in the day none would be able to soar up thermals very well. There was an osprey, and wasn’t she here to get something none of the others had? Here were a couple of Harris’s hawks, but that kind of hawk flew in packs to hunt the kind of prey larger birds went after alone.

Finally there was the goshawk, a stocky gray bird with intricate black-and-white banding down its front and very round orange eyes. She watched it preening for a moment. It was a good bird for self-defense, she knew. For its size its beak and claws were very large, and they were legendarily reckless and agile, like extra-large burly falcons that would plunge into thick brush after birds or squirrels, even going on foot. If Jake and Rachel hadn’t taken to their birds so quickly she could have suggested goshawk for either of them. That was enough to give her pause, though.

None of them really knew how the morphing worked, but it seemed to Cassie to have a huge symbolic heft, to take something of an animal into herself. Did the animals they acquired and morphed change them? Maybe Jake would start picking up on the peregrine’s anxiety, the tiger’s secretive nature. Maybe Rachel would take on the bald eagle’s bullying and the bull elephant’s temper. Did it mean something, would it mean something, that Tobias had chosen the cosmopolitan, human-tolerant red-tailed hawk and not the shyer and more specialized osprey she’d held out to Marco? And what about her own choice?

Thinking about it like _that_, goshawk wasn’t right at all. She wasn’t brave, quick to strike, dedicated. If anything she would have liked to be a vulture. Why did people identify with prey animals and hate scavengers but glorify hunters? Vultures ate meat without having to kill for it, besides some animals that were so weak they were dying anyway. They took harmful, rotting flesh into themselves and purified it. They were the custodians of the world but soared beautifully far above it.

And if she had to think of them as helping her spy on and fight aliens then they just weren’t the best choice. Falcons saw better than eagles because a falcon’s prey was so much faster and more transient. Vultures wouldn’t see as well as either - they ate things that had totally stopped moving, and they partly used smell to find them anyway. Those long-soaring wings wouldn’t help them closer to the ground. When they had to defend themselves their talons were harmless, they just had nipping beaks and smelly projectile vomit. 

She’d kept passing the enclosure that held a one-legged osprey, and now she stopped in front of it. The one she’d held for Marco to acquire had been a juvenile, basically a bird in its late teens. Adult sized, old enough to live on its own and feed itself, with the extra-long wing feathers that made it just a bit less maneuverable while also making it easier to catch the air, and some subtle tan underside markings telling other ospreys it was young. 

This osprey, leg aside, looked very similar other than lacking the tan. Its stark white and brown-black only blended together to gray in a few places. The dark markings on its white head made it look like it had a bandanna mask over its yellow eyes. It wasn’t a _bad_ idea. They were pretty big. Since the osprey ate fish almost exclusively it had a strong grasp and spiny toes which were as important as those long hooked talons. It could plunge entirely into the water and then take off carrying a heavy, struggling fish.

Choosing the osprey felt like not making a choice, almost. No one who didn’t know birds or didn’t look at both side by side would even know they were different. It didn’t call out to her. But it just sort of felt practical. This would work, even if it seemed unimaginative to repeat a species.

She entered the enclosure with a mouse’s haunch in her gloved hand. The one-legged osprey shifted and flapped to keep its balance as it adjusted, watching her. It reached for the chunk of mouse and as it beaked it up she stroked its breast and focused on the shape of it, concentrating on the thought of spiraling up on long, arched wings, seeing the world stretched out below her, and feeling the sun through her feathers. The osprey relaxed, its feathers puffing up as if it felt cozy and safe.

“Thank you. I’ll carry you with me,” she murmured, just like she’d told Clover in the barn. It had felt so meaningful then, and she was kind of disappointed that it was just sort of... silly now. Maybe it was because she had a bond with her favorite mare and barely knew this osprey, not even its sex or the name the people here had given it. Maybe it was that she’d been a different person even just a few days ago, before the kind of nightmare her parents warned her about and a new, more fantastical nightmare became one.

She let herself out and locked the door behind her. Briefly she skimmed over the bird’s plaque. Hit with buckshot, leg amputated, named Luthien - was that Chinese? She’d ask Rachel if she remembered, when there was no one around to tease her or posture at - and some information about the species that she knew already.

Then she went to find her friends and hung out, not talking or thinking about Animorphs stuff aside from how they all kept imagining how it would be to fly, another twenty minutes or so before Cassie’s dad came to fetch them. Rachel conspired somehow with him and took shotgun on the way back, leaving Jake and Cassie side by side. They didn’t hold hands, but he sat close so their arms kept touching, again and again, all the way home.


End file.
